God Cannot Be Evil. Why?

            Some atheists contend that God is an ‘Evil God’ (if at all HE exists, according to their worldview). They suppose that a good God would not permit evil to occur in our world.

            Famous atheist, Richard Dawkins called God an evil God. Philosopher Stephen Law has written elaborately on the Evil God Challenge, which argues for the presence of an all-evil God.

            So, the notion, ‘God is evil’ or ‘there is evil in God’ is quite common against the presence of the all-good God. In other words, atheists contend that we, the theists, cannot establish whether God is good or evil.

            But God just cannot be evil. Here’s why:

            According to the Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig, God is a being worthy of worship. Such a being should be the embodiment of absolute goodness. If absolute goodness is an inherent ingredient of the essence of the ‘Maximally Great Being,’ then God, who by definition, is the ‘Maximally Great Being,’ cannot be evil.¹

            Do be aware that we are not ascribing goodness to God because we observe a wealth of goodness in our world. God is not good because there is so much good in our world.

            Contrarily, God is good because HE in HIS essence is good. That’s the property of the maximally great being.

            William Lane Craig takes another route to prove that God cannot be evil. So he writes that the presence of an evil God would prove the presence of the all-good God:²

Suppose we concede for the sake of argument that an evil Creator/Designer exists. Since this being is evil, that implies that he fails to discharge his moral obligations. But where do those come from? How can this evil god have duties to perform which he is violating? Who forbids him to do the wrong things that he does? Immediately, we see that such an evil being cannot be supreme: there must be a being who is even higher than this evil god and is the source of the moral obligations which he chooses to flout, a being which is absolute goodness Himself. In other words, if Law’s evil god exists, then God exists.

            Craig goes on to explain that the ‘moral argument’ for God also reveals that God cannot be evil:³

…we are to conceive of God as an ultimate standard or paradigm of goodness. Once you have that, it will determine not only what is good but also what is evil. Just as something is good insofar as it approximates the paradigm of goodness, so something is evil insofar as it falls away from that same paradigm.

For that reason I sometimes run a moral argument for God based on moral evil in the world: without God objective moral values would not exist; evil exists; therefore, objective moral values exist (some things are evil!); therefore, God exists. Evil proves God’s existence because without God good and evil as such would not exist.

…I doubt that it is even coherent to say that there is an ultimate paradigm of evil. Certainly, there could be some evil being (Satan?) who is opposed to God; but even such a being would be evil only because he fails to live up to the standard set by God. In particular, such a being would fail to live up to his moral duties; but then where do they come from?

            Thus, Craig explains that God, who is the ultimate standard or the paradigm of goodness and who is the cause of objective moral values, should be necessarily good and cannot be evil.

            We can also deal with this objection from another vantage point: the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. In other words, the ‘Privation Theory of Evil.’

            Evil is the absence of good. For example, “Dogs are supposed to run, fetch, chase squirrels; they are supposed to have four limbs, be able to see, hear, smell, etc. A dog that does not have four limbs, that cannot see, etc., for whatever reason, is less than it should be, and so has suffered some evil.”⁴

            In other words, when a ‘good’ part possesses a certain defect, then that defective part is said to have suffered some evil. An eye is good when it provides sight because all its parts are functioning according to their fullest potential. If certain ‘good’ parts of an eye have defects, then an eye cannot provide sight. This defect, then, is the absence of good. Blindness, therefore, is an evil caused by the absence of good.

            So evil per se has no ontology.

            Evil, in a metaphysical sense, is parasitic on good.

            According to the Christian philosopher Edward Feser, God cannot be necessarily evil, since evil is parasitic on the good. Therefore, God, in HIS being, has to be necessarily good, “…evil is metaphysically parasitic on good, and thus…on being, in such a way that whatever is Being Itself would have to be Goodness Itself and therefore in no way evil. Hence, since God is Being Itself, the claim “If God exists, then He is good” is metaphysically necessary, while the claim “If God exists, He might be evil” is necessarily false.”⁵

Endnotes:

¹https://www.reasonablefaith.org/videos/other-videos/could-god-be-evil/

²https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/the-evil-god-objection/

³https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/ultimate-evil/

⁴https://aquinasonline.com/nature-of-evil/

⁵http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/10/laws-evil-god-challenge.html

Websites last accessed on 13^th March 2021.